


Awakening Iselmyr

by Phynoma



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Background Character Death, Backstory, Character Death, F/F, F/M, Souls, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:41:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26962318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phynoma/pseuds/Phynoma
Summary: "She was somehow plainer than he imagined; thin, flat-chested, freckled, with lank brown hair and dark brown eyes. Then she grinned, sly and wicked, and he was startled by how well he knew the expression."Watcher Mirad finally bothers to ask Iselmyr how she died.TW: abuse, domestic violence, child death
Relationships: Aloth Corfiser & Iselmyr, Aloth Corfiser & Iselmyr & The Watcher, Iselmyr & The Watcher
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	Awakening Iselmyr

**Author's Note:**

> Couldn't think of a fun, creative title for this one, so what you see is what you get. 
> 
> This is part of a larger Aloth/Watcher work that I'll eventually get up here...This particular fic is from near the end of my overall story, so don't expect to get the context any time soon, but it stands on its own so here y'all go.
> 
> Note: I've written fanfic for ages, but this is my first foray into actually posting it, so go easy on me! Haha, actually tho, constructive criticism is always appreciated.   
> The majority of this is italicized because a.) I was imitating in-game soul moments, and b.) it fits the tone of this piece as being a sort of poem/lament more than regular prose. That said, if it ends up being too hard to read I'll edit it :)

Mirad turned to the wisps of blue and gathered them together. Wavering at first and then stronger, a girl appeared from the pools of blood. She looked worn and haunted, her wrists too thin and the skin under her eyes blue-black with exhaustion. She was somehow plainer than he imagined; thin, flat-chested, freckled, with lank brown hair and dark brown eyes. Then she grinned, sly and wicked, and he was startled by how well he knew the expression.   
“Watcher,” she greeted. Her voice was oddly distant, as if coming from the other end of a large chamber.   
“Iselmyr,” he said.   
“Aye, so it seems,” she nodded at him, folding her arms. “Ye want tae let me get on wit’ it, then?”  
“You sacrificed yourself,” he stated, and she rolled her eyes.  
“Ah, ye make it seem awful noble,” she sniffed. “Won’ do much if ye donnae get the bleedin’ to stop, anyway. An I have nae done as much as ye sim tae think. There’s still plenty o’ me in him, and plenty of hisself spread across the floor there, so ye best get to it.”  
Mirad listened to the beat of his heart, the empty chime of the In-Between lulling time itself to slow. There was something about Iselmyr that was throwing him off. He had figured that she was human and from the countryside, and he knew her manner well enough—was that all it was? Seeing mannerisms he knew only in Aloth’s form being performed by the young girl they belonged to?  
And that was when it hit him: she was _young_. He had always had a hard time telling human ages based on appearance, but even he could tell she couldn’t be to her third decade.   
“Iselmyr,” he said slowly, “how old are you?”  
She shrugged, picking at a stray thread on her apron. “Why?”  
“I just…I just realized I don’t know how you died.”  
“You never asked,” she said. “Nae did he.”  
“Will you show me?”  
She hesitated, then set her jaw stubbornly and nodded. He reached out to the tendrils of smoky blue, and then—

_They are poor, but so is everyone, so it doesn’t really matter. Her parents work the land, her mother spinning the flax that her father brings home from the field. She spends her days in carting baskets between the fields and her home, in spinning, in taking care of her baby sister. In her rare, free hours, she runs down to the creek with Milldryn, the potter’s daughter._  
_Summer days of long, deer-skinny legs and freckled elbows and rough-housing with the miller’s sons. Winter nights of her mother singing lullabies and telling stories next to the fire to distract from the thinness of the stew. She and Millie sneak out on clear nights to trade secrets and watch the stars, growing into their wild deer limbs, talking about the things they aren’t supposed to know yet. When they are fifteen, they steal the potter’s whiskey jug and get drunk in the fields, laughing and spinning and dancing. She knows Millie wants to kiss her, so she does._  
_She is seventeen and her little sister is six when her parents die. There is a fever that year, and those who survive are marked with red, scabbing scars that bleed for weeks after the sickness had past, and never really fade. Millie cries over the stain that mars the right side of her face, over the loss of her prospects and her pale beauty. Iselmyr tells her she is still the loveliest girl to grace the Northern plains._  
_They spend less time together, now that she has taken over her parents’ house. She watches over her sister, and she spins, and after a short while she remembers how to dream without nightmares. And although she loves Millie, and her sister, she wants bairns of her own; so when the handsome new blacksmith comes to town she sets about wooing him without delay. He is affable and well-liked, even for a stranger, and she has known all the village boys for her whole life—too many pranks, too much history to ever imagine settling down with one of them._  
_But the blacksmith likes her, too; likes her brash and open ways, how she runs her parent’s household and bargains in the market with a fire that both intimidates and charms all who meet her. They are married by the end of the year, and she and her sister moved into the house he has built on the edge of the village. Millie stays with her the night before the wedding: one last night of secrets. The potter offers to give her away, but she refuses. She gives herself._

  
_They are passionate, the new lovers; he like a steady forge and her like a wildfire. She dances too much and laughs too loud and flirts with too much abandon for a married woman—or, at least, that is what he says the first time he strikes her. And she, who has never been taught that wives are meant to be submissive, hits him back. The shock of it brings him back to his senses, and they kiss and make wild, heated love in lieu of apology. Their days pass in simplicity; he works his wares for the village, and she spins flax and raises her sister. Before their first year of their marriage is up, they have a son. He is tiny and perfect and she loves him more than she thought it was possible to love anything._  
_But some sickness befalls the child when he is only a few months old, a sickness that leaves the village mother confused and the babe wailing day in and day out. Desperation turns to resignation and the bare need to keep things from getting worse. She spends more and more time nursing her babe, feeding him drops of barley water and tonic, singing her mother’s lullabies with her sleep-cracked voice. The constant crying keeps the blacksmith awake and his wife distant, preoccupied by the babe._  
_One day he snaps: red-eyed and incoherent, he yanks the babe from its crib, in front of her horrified eyes and those of the child playing on the floor next to her, and he began to shake. Later, she doesn’t remember leaving her chair or crossing the room. She doesn’t know how she got the babe from him, or how she pressed him to her sister’s arms and tells her to lock herself in the bedroom. The blacksmith, all rage and sleeplessness and madness, turns on her. She goads him, knowing in her heart that as long as he is focused on her, he will leave the child alone. They fight with words and fists until he is exhausted, until he storms from the house and into the forgiving night, and she collects herself and feeds the children and waits for her husband to return. When he does, he acts as if nothing had happened; so she does the same._

  
_They continue like this for a month, until the babe finally recovers without a clue to his sickness. Friends learn to stop asking about the bruises, the cuts on her hands. She gives only blithe answers and mild threats to those too foolish to ask, in any case. The neighbors do their best to ignore the noises from the house in the evening. Millie invites her and the children to stay with her and her husband; she is married to the son of the innkeeper now, one who didn’t blanche at her scarred face. Iselmyr refuses. She thinks, perhaps, that it is over; that her husband’s madness was temporary. She does not think about the times he strikes her in anger, for she knows she provokes him and does not imagine that things could be different._  
_Two months later, the babe’s crying is long over but the fights are not. She begins to encourage her husband to go to the pub before coming home, because the days he comes home drunk are the days he is too tired to hit her. But she hates the smell of booze on his lips and in his beard, and she has always been bad at holding her tongue. One evening, she calls him a drunkard and a fool, and he calls her a whore. Since the sickness, their son is oddly quiet, he claims. The babe should have been crawling, trying to make words, but all he does was lie there and gurgle. He, the blacksmith, did not produce some half-wit child._  
_He’s only a wee babe, she pleads with him. He needs more time. He’s been ill, and didn’t the blacksmith himself always need some time to get back to normal after a bad case of the winter chills?_

_She might have convinced him but for the passing of time with no change in the boy. Fey-child, he starts to call it. Changeling. His mood grows darker, his rages less frequent but more violent. He refuses to let her take the child to the village mother, claiming she has bewitched him. Friends no longer come to the house, and she rarely leaves for fear of leaving the child alone without her body as a shield._

  
_Then, one night, she accepts an invitation from Millie to eat dinner at her home on the other edge of town. They have not talked in so long and she is tired, her indomitable spirit finally flagging. One night, she thinks. One night cannae hurt. She leaves her sister-ward and her babe with a neighbor and tells them not to bring the children home until she fetches them herself. Her husband works late in the summer, and more oft than not goes to the pub, so she hopes for a few hours to herself._  
_And it is good to see Millie, who has grown into her bones at long last and who is plump and shining and soft and everything wonderful. Her scar is cracked and ugly, but she smiles and laughs and twirls Iselmyr around just as if they are carefree girls stargazing in the fields. They talk for hours, just the two of them. Iselmyr tries to remember the last time happiness felt so easy._  
_She leaves later than she had meant to, tipsy on beer and drunk on friendship. The lamp is lit in the window of her home. Something cold squeezes at her heart, and she runs. She doesn’t bother to stop at the neighbor’s house. If her children are still there, and she is wrong, then nothing will come of going home first. But she knows she isn’t wrong. Even as she prays, as she screams for her husband, she knows. And when she throws open the door and finds the blacksmith with the silent babe in his hands, it is already too late._  
_For once, she doesn’t strike back. She takes her sister from where she is huddled on the dirt floor and she turns back to the night and she runs. She returns to Millie, dear Milldryn, and collapses on her doorstep, a mess of tears and of mud. The innkeeper’s son picks her up and brings her inside while Millie locks the door. They get no sense out of her that night, for all she screams and beats at them and rails against the gods. She cannot explain how everywhere she looks, every surface in their simple home is spilling over with her guilt. There is blood in her eyes that only she can see._

_The blacksmith leaves before sunrise. It is a fortnight before she sees him again, but in the meantime there are whispers. It is a small village, and there is little else of such interest. No one knows for certain what occurred—not the neighbor who let the blacksmith take his children home (he was their father, what was I to do?); not the village mother who had seen the rising desperation in the blacksmith’s eyes (but who would have thought he would go so far?); not the town magistrate, who was friends with the blacksmith and drank with him on many a night, who could scarcely believe the rumors (more like that devil of a wife killed the child and left him to take the blame). Iselmyr stays silent. She spins her flax and does not flinch when it cut her fingers. At night, she holds her sister while the child sobs, afraid to sleep and meet again the nightmare only she had witnessed._

  
_She is nineteen when she dies._  
_Grief has worn her thin but it has not dulled her. She feels his coming like a storm just beyond the horizon. Perhaps that is why she sends Millie to the market while her husband is at the inn. It is the first time she has been alone in weeks. As if the opportunity itself has summoned him, he appears in the doorway._  
_She has made a fool of him, he says. She has disgraced him. He had waited in their home for her to return, and when she did not, he wandered the fields and the groves, begging the spirits to return their true child. They had not. If she had helped him, their family would still be whole; now, he was looked upon as a murderer. It is she who had done this to him, by her stubbornness and lack of faith._  
_She turns away from him only for a moment to kneel and pull her sister to her. Her mother is there, in the dark eyes and the fair wisps of mouse-brown hair. She can save her: this last, tiny piece of her family. She looks the child in her eyes and holds her arms tight and tells her what to do._  
_There is a window in the back bedroom, she tells her. He will not be able to follow you there._  
_She pushes her sister away._  
_The first blow catches her by surprise and she falls hard, skating across the floorboards. She sees blood scatter across the floor like droplets from a priest’s aspergillum. She rises, fists clenched, teeth bared._  
_Go, she shouts._  
_Blood on the wood floor. Blood in her mouth. She can sense her sister behind her, frozen in fear. She rushes at the blacksmith, snarling like an animal._  
_GO, she shouts again. He grabs her arm, too hard. She twists away, and he throws her again to the floor. She rises a second time._  
_Her sister flees._

  
_She does not give in easily. When he starts to back off, she throws herself at him again. She screams insults, every small thing that she knows will keep him focused on her. She fights with tooth and nail and barbed words. He is much larger than her, much stronger, but she claws at him like a weasel at a bear, wearing him down, keeping his attention. She calls him a murderer and a coward. She attacks his work, his friendships, his virility. She keeps getting back up._  
_He pushes her down, and she stumbles against the empty fireplace. The innkeeper’s son is a whittler, and there is a knife lying on the brick hearth that neither of them noticed until now. She grabs it and turns as he rushes at her, and it sinks into his stomach. It is not a large knife, and though he bellows, he pulls it out and does not fall. He was angry before, but now it is something else._  
_She can see the change in his eyes; it is the same look he wore when she found him holding the body of their child. It is at the moment that she knows he cannot, will not stop. She laughs, wild and triumphant. She laughs even as her breath comes shallow and her eyesight darkens. She has a moment of regret that Millie will find her like this. There is sharp, blinding pain, and then nothing._

_Nothing until the heavy slap of flesh on flesh, and there is blood, again, and pain, again. The fear of a child and the sting of betrayal. The floor is tile this time, the hands calloused by the sword and not the hammer, but it doesn’t matter. She knows this, and she is reacting before she thinks to question where she is or what has happened._

_She dies fighting, and she Awakens with a snarl still on her lips._


End file.
